Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

The nature of work she did develops high emotions. It arises from crises. It deals only with disruption, disjunction — circumstances in people's lives that cannot be met with the responses that serve for continuity. To monitor trials is to 'monitor' the soaring and plunging graph of feelings that move men and women to act, endangering themselves; the curves and drops of bravery, loss of nerve, betrayal; cunning learnt by courage, courage learnt by discipline — and others which exceed the competence of any graph to record, would melt its needle in the heat of intensity: the record of people who, receiving a long jail sentence, tell the court they regret nothing; of those who, offered amnesty on condition that they accept this as 'freedom' in place of the concept for which they went to prison, choose to live out their lives there. Such inconceivable decisions are beyond the capacity of anyone who does not make one. The spirit's shouldering of the world, as Atlas's muscles took on the physical weight of the world. Such people cannot be monitored. But knowing them and their families, who have this abnormal — Hannah, speaking of it once with Sonny, corrects herself — no, not abnormal, can't use that word for it — that divine strength expands the emotional resources of an ordinary individual (like Hannah) even in grasping that it does exist.

Association with prisoners of conscience is a special climate in which this heightening infloresces. Listening in courts while the sacrifice of their individual lives for man against evil slowly is distorted by the law in volumes of recorded words, police videos, in the mouths of State witnesses, into an indictment for having committed evil; touching the hands of the accused across the barrier while they joke about their jailers; visiting the wives, husbands, parents, children, the partners in many kinds of alliances broken by imprisonment — all this extended Hannah's feelings in a way she would not have known possible for anyone. In love. She was in love. Not as the term is understood, as she had been in love, at twenty-three, with her lawyer, and they had ceased to love. In love, a temperature and atmospheric pressure of shared tension, response, the glancing contact of trust in place of caresses, and the important, proud responsibility of doing anything asked, even the humblest tasks, in place of passionate private avowals. A loving state of being.

It was in this state that she developed the persistence, the bold lies, the lack of scruple in threatening international action to pressure prison authorities to allow her to see detainees. And it was in this state she understood her mission to visit their families.

She drove a Volkswagen Beetle through the battleground streets of Soweto to find old people who didn't know whether to trust her, she was received in the neat segregated suburbia of Bosmont and Lenasia by women who didn't know how they were going to keep up payments on the glossy furniture, she lost herself in the squatter camps where addresses didn't exist and the only routes marked in the summer muck of mud and rot were those rutted by the wheelbarrows of people fetching their supplies of beer from the liquor store on the main road. The house in the lower-class white suburb into which one of the detainees had moved his family illegally had a twirly wrought-iron gate and a plaster pelican, no doubt left behind by the white owners as the shed cast of any creature exactly reveals itself. The wife was beautiful and correct, composed, stockings and high heels — it had the effect of making Hannah feel not intrusive but unnecessary, and talking away to cover this up. The wife kept listening sympathetically, making Hannah's confusion worse. This quiet woman apparently was accustomed to being obeyed. There was tea ordered to be brought in by a daughter in whom the mother's beauty was reproduced as pert prettiness. A schoolgirl who worked at weekends; and the wife had a good job, she politely made it perfectly clear they wanted no-one to enter the arrangements they themselves had made to manage without the father of the family. The mother, with her fine, slow smile (what perfect teeth for a middle-aged woman; Hannah's were much repaired at only thirty) put a hand on the shoulder of an overgrown-looking boy who had kept Hannah standing a moment, in suspicion, before letting her in. — My son's the man of the house now.—

A house that smelled of stale spiced cooking. On the wall a travelling salesman's Kahlil Gibran texts. But in the glass-fronted bookcase a surprising little library, not only the imitation-leather-bound mail-order classics usually to be found as a sign of hunger for knowledge, and not only the Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Gandhi and Nkrumah, Mandela and Biko always to be found as a sign of political self-education, but Kafka and D. H. Lawrence, she noticed in glimpses aside, while talking, talking, talking like that.

She had been there once again. But that was after. It was when the house was invaded by laughter and music, all that it had been the first time thrust aside, as the furniture was for dancing. The loving state of being in which she had sat with the beautiful wife, the daughter, the son, was also thrust away, terrifyingly transformed into something else: passionate awareness of the ex-prisoner host. The first time he and she made love she had felt a strange threat of loss in the midst of joy, and had tried to explain it to herself by attempting to put it, in another way, to him. He didn't really understand; but sexual love has the matchless advantage of the flesh as reassurance for anything, everything, for the moment. The body speaks and all is silenced.

So everything in that house she remembered from that first day was cherished because it was part of him. It was all she had of that part of him she could not really know, which she had transformed into a lover. It was what both he and she discounted between them, in her room.

She would have liked to be the older confidante of the girl (looked as if she needed someone) and the adult-who-is-not-a-parent, so useful to an adolescent, in the life of the boy, his son. Even the pseudo-philosophy of the cheap framed texts became tender evidence of the qualities of the man who had left behind him fake consolations of uplift taken by the powerless and poor. She put away for safe-keeping her first day's vision of his house like a lock of hair from the head of the child that has become the man.

It's part of the commonplace strategy of adultery to appear in company where both wife and mistress are present. It's accepted as merely a way of hiding, by displaying there's nothing to hide. But Sonny was so inexperienced, he did not know how to suppress, in himself, the real urge discovered to underlie such confrontations. He learned they were not brought about by any social inevitability it would look suspicious to avoid; they were not arranged to reassure and protect Aila or to ensure that if he and Hannah were by chance to be seen in public together it would appear an innocent encounter within a mutual political circle. Giving his view on how to get the boycotting youth back into school without compromising their political clout, he had the attention of a lawyer and two educationists, comrades on the National Education Crisis Committee, when somewhere behind him he heard mingled in group conversation the two voices he knew best in the world. Two birds singing in his emotion: he did not hear the chatter of the other women, the cheeping of sparrows. He became eloquent, his nostrils round with conviction, he had never expressed himself more forcefully than while, the first time, instead of keeping the two women fastidiously apart within him, he possessed both at once. The exaltation was the reverse of his fear of Aila finding out.

Later, alone, desolated, shamed, he understood. He sought, even contrived, ways of appearing with his wife in houses where his other woman would be a guest.